The story this week: How the unacceptable face of capitalism was revealed by the BHS scandal
“Then he threatened to kill me again. I know it sounds silly, but apparently he says he was in the helicopter squad of the SAS. And I know he has got a gun.”
I wrote that line in The Guardian in 2016. It is probably the most bonkers paragraph I ever put in a story.
It is a quote from Darren Topp, who was then the chief executive of BHS and giving evidence to MPs about the collapse of the department store chain.
BHS fell into administration 10 years ago this month. 11,000 jobs were lost, 164 shops were closed and 20,000 pensioners were left with a £571 million deficit in their pension scheme.
The story remains one of the most extraordinary I have ever worked on. It involved meetings in pubs with sources, veiled threats, not-so-veiled threats and, most importantly, the loss of many people’s livelihoods.
We ran a diary from an anonymous BHS employee in The Guardian as the final shops closed that summer. The employee worked in a shop in Kent and the account of their final shift was a sobering read.
“We spent Sunday morning throwing whatever odds and ends were lying around into a giant skip in the store’s loading bay,” they wrote. “Staff went through everything to see if there was anything worth scavenging, but little was of any real use. I pocketed a metal tape measure, despite a total lack of interest in DIY.
“Once the general detritus had been disposed of, the remainder of these two shifts was a waste of everyone’s time. I spent several hours kicking a football around the now-empty ground floor. There was no tearful farewell to the old building as we exited the front doors for the last time, because, having sat in the stifling heat doing nothing for the previous three hours, we were all desperate to stretch our legs and feel some fresh air on our faces. No-one even looked back, as far as I recall.”
A decade on, there is still much to learn from the mess of BHS. But one lesson stands out - that strong leadership, hard work and dedication cannot overcome a bad owner.
LinkedIn has driven an obsession with culture, mindset and the language of leadership. But the BHS saga demonstrates an uncomfortable truth - none of that matters if the owner of the business doesn’t know what they are doing.
